Lightjet Photo Prints

Talk about serious imaging power, DPI Direct is the only shop in San Diego with two LightJet 430’s you can image Giant Photos San Diego! The Lightjet 430 has a 36-bit color space, capable of producing 68 billion colors, which ensures optimum control over the light source to reproduce color with perfect fidelity. In comparison, other photo printers are limited to 24 bits or 16.7 million colors.

There are some things that even a 1200 or 1400 dpi inkjet printer cannot do. They can simulate or come close to continuous tone, but there are special wide format printers that achieve continuous tone naturally. The Lightjet exposes photographic paper with laser light. There is no ink, and no printhead going back and forth, hence no banding, no grainy dot pattern. A Lightjet photograph is an actual photographic print exposed by the Lightjet 430 laser photo imager. The printer reads the information in a digital file, then uses lasers to expose the image onto various photo materials made by Kodak and Fuji. This materials have been tested to be more archival than other popular color printing methods (lasting over 60 years without noticeable fading in controlled conditions), including Ilfochrome printing. Unlike inkjet prints, which lay ink on paper, Lightjet prints are made on light-sensitive photo paper, which is exposed with red, green and blue lasers.

“Lightjet prints are true photographs”

Lightjet printers set the standard for true photographic quality. An internal drum holds photo media stationary while imaging with three lasers, achieving image quality superior to all wide format printers – photographic, inkjet and electrostatic. Lightjet’s imaging technology ensures a constant pixel size, shape and intensity over the entire image. Media is held stationary within a precision internal drum, while a spinning mirror directs laser light to expose the photographic material. Using red, green and blue lasers, the Lightjet 430 achieves true continuous-tone. Inkjet and electrostatic printers, which simulate photo quality with half-tone dot patterns, would need to image at 4000 dpi to duplicate the same image crispness, highlights and shadow detail. Archival quality: Normal exposure to indoor light sources should not cause any significant fading for 60+ years. Direct sunlight may shorten life.

Not recommended for long term outdoor use. The Lightjet 430 can print true continuous tone images up to 50″ by 120″ with a hardware optical resolution of 300 dpi. For high-volume applications resolution can be lowered to 200dpi (via dedicated set of large aperture optics), while doubling the output. A dedicated on-board interpolation engine allows for smooth scaling of low-res images for optimal printing results. Because of its generous colour gamut, art to be printed on LJ430 is best represented using AdobeRGB1998 colour space. Print Times 200 dpi Image Size Print Time 50.5×120.5″ 5.8 minutes 300 dpi Image Size Print Time 50.5×120.5″ 11.2 minutes Print time includes material advance and look-up table download. Actual print time depends on computer configuration, file complexity and speed of data storage device. Resolution Spatial Resolution Continuous-tone: 200, 300 / Res 7.9, 12. Apparent half-tone resolution is 4,000 dpi. Color Resolution 36 bits; each 8-bit input channel is interpolated to 12 bits to produce a 36-bit outdoor color space, resulting in smoother gradients, and increased highlight and shadow detail.